A technology of desalinating seawater that is one of water treatment technologies is a representative technology field capable of solving domestic and foreign demand of water, providing an alternative water resource securing technology, developing overseas markets, and simultaneously creating high added values, and a market of such desalination of seawater currently has a scale of three million tons per day and is expected to grow to a scale of six million and two hundred thousand tons per day in 2015.
Also, since the technology of desalinating seawater becomes a solution for providing alternative water resources to domestic and foreign areas short of water, and particularly, reduces costs and improves environmental problems by replacing a water resource providing method using building dams that raises controversy in environmental problem, it is expected that a demand thereof continuously increases in the future.
As the method of desalinating seawater described above, conventionally, an evaporation method and a reverse osmosis method have been applied. However, since the evaporation method is not economic due to a large consumption amount of energy necessary for water evaporation and needs a large amount of all sorts of facilities, recently, a method of desalinating seawater using the reverse osmosis method is generally used.
However, even in the case of such a reverse osmosis method, since there are a complicated pretreatment process, frequent replacement of reverse osmosis membrane, and a large amount of energy consumed to process seawater with high salt concentration, a new seawater desalination technology for replacing or complementing the same is necessarily required.
For this, recently, research and development of water treatment including desalination of seawater using a principle of forming gaseous hydrates have been performed. The content related to a water treatment technology using the principle of forming gaseous hydrates is disclosed in detail in following [Document 1] filed by the applicant of the present invention.
Since the water treatment technology using the principle of forming gaseous hydrates is a method of obtaining pure water by introducing a gaseous guest material to target water of treatment such as seawater and dissociating gaseous hydrates formed by a reaction therebetween, water treatment efficiency depends on forming efficiency of gaseous hydrates. However, despite many advantages, the conventional water treatment technology using the principle of forming gaseous hydrates has a difficulty in replacing the reverse osmosis method due to low efficiency of forming gaseous hydrates.
[Document 1] Korean Patent Publication No. 2009-0122811 (published on Dec. 1, 2009)